[whatwg] Full Screen API Feedback

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Thu, 12 May 2011 06:45:33 +0200, Jer Noble <jer.noble at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On May 11, 2011, at 7:41 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>

>> For your use-case of falling back to a "full-window" substitute mode, I  
>> would suggest Web authors automatically go into the full-window state  
>> almost immediately after requesting fullscreen, but cancel it if the  
>> window actually goes into fullscreen mode.
>
> That seems non-optimal.  It would result in a very confusing user  
> experience ("The page is requesting full screen?  But it already is full  
> screen!"), and I doubt any authors would choose to implement it that way.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I want to add my support to what Jer is  
saying here. Any API that requires (or encourages) the page author to go  
into a full-window state while waiting for explicit user confirmation to  
go to full-screen sounds like it would give a terrible user experience.

There certainly is something to be said to allowing full-window as a  
fallback when the user would rather not use up all of the screen estate,  
but it seems to me like this is something the browser UI could provide  
anyway: if the user so prefers (by pressing a button or changing a  
per-site or global preference), whenever a page goes into full-screen, it  
would instead just do full-window.

Regarding user prompts, I am tentatively in favor of the approach that Jer  
appears to be arguing for, which is to never prompt the user but rather  
simply require direct user interaction in order to go to fullscreen,  
together with whatever animations, overlays and other measures to make it  
abundantly clear to the user what just happened. One approach could be to  
show the user a prompt *after* going to fullscreen, offering to leave  
fullscreen or stay, together with remembering that choice for that site or  
globally.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software